kettle-pails, and a frying-pan. The latter can be used as a bread-oven.

A few minor items, of practically no weight, suggest themselves--toilet
requisites, fly-dope, needle and thread, a cathartic, pain-killer, a
roll of surgeon's bandage, pipe and tobacco. But when the pack is made
up, and the duffel bag tied, you find that, while fitted for every
emergency but that of catastrophe, you are prepared to "go light."




III.

THE JUMPING-OFF PLACE.


Sometime, no matter how long your journey, you will reach a spot whose
psychological effect is so exactly like a dozen others that you will
recognize at once its kinship with former experience. Mere physical
likeness does not count at all. It may possess a water-front of laths
and sawdust, or an outlook over broad, shimmering, heat-baked plains.
It may front the impassive fringe of a forest, or it may skirt the calm
stretch of a river. But whether of log or mud, stone or unpainted
board, its identity becomes at first sight indubitably evident. Were
you, by the wave of some beneficent wand, to be transported direct to
it from the heart of the city, you could not fail to recognize it. "The
jumping-off place!" you would cry ecstatically, and turn with unerring
instinct to the Aromatic Shop.

For here is where begins the Long Trail. Whether it will lead you